Many times when I write a program it's to solve a problem. With Pepperminty Wiki, it was that I needed a lightweight wiki engine - and MediaWiki was just too complex. With TeleConsole, it was that I wanted to debug a C&sharp; Program in an environment that had neither a debugger nor a console (I'm talking about you, Unity 3D).

Today, I'm releasing RhinoReminds, an XMPP bot that reminds you about things. As you might have guessed, this is the end product of a few different posts I've made on here recently:

Remind me to water the greenhouse tomorrow at 4:03pm
Show all reminders
Delete reminders 2, 3, 4, and 7
Remind me in 1 hour to check the oven

...and it'll respond accordingly. It figures out which action to take based on the first word of the sentence you send it, but after that it uses AI (specifically Microsoft.Recognizers.Text, which I posted about here) to work out what you how you want it to do it.

I'm still working out a few bugs (namely reconnecting automagically after the connection to the server is lost, and ensuring all the messages it sends in reply actually make sense), but it's at the point now where it's stable enough that I can release it to everyone who'd either like to use it for themselves, or is simply curious :-)

If you'd like to run an instance of the bot for yourself, I recommend heading over to my personal git server here:

The readme file should contain everything you need to know to get started. If not, let me know by contacting me, or commenting here!

Unfortunately, I'm not able to offer a public instance of this bot at the moment, due to concerns about spam. However, patches to improve the bots resistance against spammers (perhaps a cooldown period or something or too many messages are sent? or a limit of 50 active reminders per account?) are welcome.

Found this interesting? Got a cool use for it? Want help setting it up yourself? Comment below!

A little while ago I was asked about generating a wordsearch in a custom shape. I thought to myself "someone has to have built this before...", and while I was right to an extent, I couldn't find one that let you use any shape you liked.

This, of course, was unacceptable! You've probably guessed it by now, but I went ahead and wrote my own :P

While I wrote it a little while ago, I apparently never got around to posting about it on here.

In short, it works by using an image you drop into the designated area on the page as the shape the word search should take. Each pixel is a single cell of the word search - with the alpha channel representing whether or not a character is allowed to be placed there (transparent means that it can't contain a character, and opaque means that it can).

Creating such an image is simple. Personally, I recommend Piskel or GIMP for this purpose.

Once done, you can start building a wordlist in the wordlist box at the right-hand-side. It should rebuild the word search as soon as you click out of the box. If it doesn't, then you've found a bug! Please report it here.

With the word search generated, you can use the Question Sheet and Answer Sheet links to open printable versions for export.

I've generated a word search of the current tags in the tag cloud on this blog too: Question Sheet [50.3KiB], Answer Sheet [285.6KiB]

The most complicated part of this was probably the logistics behind rude word removal. Thankfully, I did't have to find and maintain such a list of words, as the futility npm package does this for me, but algorithmically guaranteeing that by censoring 1 rude word another is not accidentally created in another direction is a nasty problem.

If you're interested in a more technical breakdown of one (or several!) particular aspects of this - let me know! While writing about all of it would probably make for an awfully long post, a specific aspect or two should be more manageable.

In the future, I'll probably revisit this and add additional features to it, such as the ability to restrict which directions words are placed in, for example. If you've got a suggestion of your own, open an issue (or even better, open a pull request :D)!

For a project of mine (which I might post about once it's more stable), I'm going to need a way to find the distance to a point from the mouse cursor to implement an eraser. I've attempted this problem before - but it didn't exactly go to plan. To that end, I decided to implement the algorithm on its own to start with - so that I could debug it properly without all the (numerous) moving parts of the project I'm writing it for getting in the way.

As you may have guessed since you're reading this post, it actually went rather well! Using the C++ implementation on this page as a reference, it didn't take more than an hour or two to get a reasonable implementation working - and it didn't take a huge amount of time to tidy it up into an npm package for everyone to use!

My implementation uses ES6 Modules - so you may need to enable them in about:config or chrome://flags if you haven't already (don't believe the pages online that say you need Firefox / Chrome nightly - it's available in stable, just disabled by default) before taking a look at the demo, which you can find here:

(Click and drag to draw a line - your distance from it is shown in the top left)

The code behind it is actually quite simple - just rather full of nasty maths that will give you a headache if you try and understand it all at once (I broke it down, which helped). The library exposes multiple methods to detect a point's distance from different kinds of line - one for multi-segmented lines (which I needed in the first place), one for a single (finite) line (which the multi-segmented line employs), and one for a single infinite line - which I implemented first, using this Wikipedia article - before finding that it was buggy because it was for an infinite line (even though the article's name is apparently correct)!

I've written up a usage guide if you're interested in playing around with it yourself.

I've also got another library that I've released recently (also for Nibriboard) that simplifies multi-segmented lines instead of finding the distance to them, which I may post about about soon too!

Hey! After a large amount of research, I've finally figured out how to create a simple NuGet package. Since I ended up using TeleConsole in a recent ACW and it doesn't have any dependencies (making packaging easier!), I decided to use it to test the system.

I think it's turned out rather well actually - you can find it on NuGet here.

Since it's been such a complicated process, rather than talking about TeleConsole itself, I'd like to give a sort-of tutorial on how I did it instead (if you'd like to read more about TeleConsole, I posted about it when I first released it here).

To start with, you'll need to install NuGet. Once done, the next step is to create a .nuspec file for your project. It goes in the same directory as the .csproj file for the project you want to publish on NuGet. I haven't yet figured out how to reference another project in the same solution and have it work with NuGet, but I should imagine it's mostly automatic. Here's the .nuspec file for TeleConsole:

As you can see, it's actually a fairly simple format - based on XML of course, since C&sharp; seems to love it for some reason. The bits in $ signs are special - they are references to the corresponding values in the .csproj file. You can do it for <version> too - but I was experiencing issues with it not picking this up correctly, so I'm specifying it manually. More information about this can be found on the Microsoft website - links are available at the bottom of this post.

With that done, the next step is to package it into a `.nupkg file 0 which is basically just a renamed .zip file with a specific structure. The nuget command-line application has the ability to do this for us - but doesn't work on Linux without an extra argument (thanks to @ArtOfSettling on GitHub for discovering this!):

nuget pack -MsbuildPath /usr/lib/mono/msbuild/15.0/bin/

...Windows users don't need to include the -MsbuildPath /usr/lib/mono/msbuild/15.0/bin/ bit. This command will output a .nupkg file, which you can then upload to nuget.org here, once you're signed in.

(Above: A screenshot of the demo of my implementation of Visvalingam's line simplification algorithm. Link below!)

For a secret project of mine I've been working on since about February time (if I recall correctly), I've discovered that I could make some considerable use of a line simplification algorithm. The tricky thing is though that I need an implementation in both Javascript and C&sharp; - which will both return identical results.

Initially, I chose the Ramer-Douglas-Peucker Algorithm, but I ended up implementing Visvalingam's Algorithm instead, as I encountered issues with calculating the shortest distance from a point to a line reliably along with other algorithmic problems that I determined weren't worth the time to fix.

Visvalingam's algorithm is actually really simple. Suppose we take a line:

If we create a sliding window with a width of 3 and slide it along the list of points, then we get a set of triangles. To simplify the line, we can calculate the area of each of these triangles, and remove the centre point of the triangle with the smallest area.

Then we can continue removing the centre point of the smallest triangle until we reach a triangle with an area that's above a threshold we set - and this is Visvalingam's Algorithm.

Though I haven't written the C&sharp; version yet, I've completed the Javascript implementation - and created a demo for you to play around with! Here's a link:

Note that you'll need to enable ES6 Module support in your browser to get it to work, as I've used ES6 Modules whilst building it.

In Firefox this can be done by setting dom.moduleScripts.enabled to true in about:config, and in chrome by visiting chrome://flags/#enable-javascript-harmony (sorry, hyperlinks don't work for chrome:// urls IIRC!), enabling it, and restarting your browser.

Finally, I've released it as an npm package. If you aren't aware of npm, it's really cool. It's the primary package manager for Javascript - I've written a blog post on this here.

Once I've written the C&sharp; version I'll have another bash at trying to get Nuget to package it. I think I know what the issue has been so far - so hopefully it works this time! If it does I'll blog about that too.

Found this useful? Think it's cool? Let me know in the comments below!

Just yesterday, I was browsing my repositories on both my personal git server (git.starbeamrainbowlabs.com) and GitHub, and I stumbled across a program I wrote a while ago and then completely forgot about. It lets you share a directory of files and pictures via http. The picture above is from the wallpapers folder on my laptop here!

On further inspection, I discovered that it didn't require too much work to tidy it up for a release, so I spent an hour or two tidying up a few things, and here is version 0.1! My, it's been far too long since I've blogged about a release of something on here....

If you want to share things yourself, you can download the latest version over here.

In the future, I might add an optional graphical interface to make it even easier for people to use :D

It's actually quite simple. It's powered by the System.Net.HttpServer class (so Windows users will either need to install mono or give it administrative privileges, which is a real shame) since I originally wrote it before I put the GlidingSquirrel together, though it does have it's own routing system of my own devising.

The pages it serves themselves are actually plain XML files, which are rendered with XSLT by the user's browser. This keeps the content that GalleryShare has to dynamically generate simple, and has the added benefit that it can be generated with C&csharp;'s System.Xml.XmlWriter class. It's practically a browser-side templating system, which also has the added benefit of providing an XML-based API for others to consume.

Thumbnails are generated with C&sharp;'s inbuilt System.Drawing image handling functions - I did initially want to use Magick.NET (C&sharp; bindings for the awesome ImageMagick library) has the System.Drawing classes appear to be a bit funny about the images they'll accept, but Linux support doesn't seem to have landed just yet.

Are you interested in a more in-depth look at how GalleryShare renders thumbnails, or outputs XML? Perhaps the XSLT has caught your eye. Let me know in the comments below!

I little while ago I wrote the first version of Soundbox. I forgot to post about it earlier, so I am posting about it now.

Soundbox is a tiny Javascript library I wrote after adding sound to another of my projects via Audio(). I found that you could only play a given sound once, unless you set the currentTime property to 0. I knew that I would forget this later so I wrote a library to do this for me.

The entire library is 1.04kb unminified, and a tiny 0.64kb(!) when minified.

I have uploaded the source to a github repository here: sbrl/soundbox. You can also find usage information there in the readme.

Recently I found a post on reddit by someone called am2064 about a 'one file wiki' called 'Minty Wiki' written in PHP. I took a look and whilie it was cool, I found it to have some bugs in it. I also found that it needed an extra PHP file to parse markdown to make it work properly. Still, I thought it was a cool idea so I decided to have a go myself.

694 lines of code later, I had something that worked and I thought that I might post about here on my blog. It is by no means finished, but it is in a somewhat usable (hopefully secure) state. I decided that markdown was the most logical choice for editing pages, so I modified Slimdown (by Johnny Broadway) to add internal link parsing and tweaked the bold/italics code to be mroe like Gmail's chat amongst other things. I first found Slimdown when looking for a lightweight markdown parser for comments on this blog.

I named my creation 'Pepperminty Wiki' (after the wiki that gave me the idea). It currently allows you to create and edit pages (although you need access to the server's files to delete pages currently), list all current pages, and view a printable version of a page. It even has a 'search' box that allows you to type in the name of the page you want to view. The search box has an HTML5 <datalist> to provide the autocomplete functionality.

To use it yourself, simply download index.php in the github repository below and put it in a folder on your server. Make sure that you have enabled write access to the folder though, or else you will start to see to rather strange error messages :)

To configure it, simply open the file you downloaded with your favourite text editor. You will find the settings (along with an explanation of each) at the top of the file. Make sure that you change the usernames and passwords!

This week I have some clouds for you, rendered via the HTML5 <canvas>. I wrote these in early 2013. I have not had a lot of time this week, but something cool is coming soon :)

The clouds themselves are stored in an array, and are composed of a random number of circles. This array is then iterated over 60 times a second and rendered using the HTML5 <canvas>. setInterval() is used to schedule the drawing of the frames, but I really should go back and upgrade that to requestAnimationFrame().